I usually prefer representing easy special cases in a short

rather than adding indentation to long chunks of code that only makes readers look down to see if something joined is still done at the end. Better make it clear right away that we're done handling this case.

Agree. I just kept the style of the old code.

I wonder, why	 and not simply	? Is there a reason?

No technical reason. Probably based on Python's hex character spelling or due to consistency with the other two-digit codes above. The XML character spec does not need (or mention) leading zeros.

I'm happy to keep the leading zero. If you need compact data, use compression. That's way more effective than stripping some zeros from rare tab characters.

xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr() uses	.

Which makes me wonder why we need a new implementation here, rather than importing the existing one.

I now looked up the implementation insaxutils.py – it looks fairly slow.minidom will probably not become high-performance by any accident, but it doesn't feel good to slow it down even more. It's probably worth a new implementation..

It is sad, but there is a copy of escaping function in almost every module which outputs XML or HTML. On one hand, it is a trivial function, and we want to avoid unneeded dependencies. On other hand, efficient and complete implementation is not so trivial. Butxml.sax.saxutils version is too generalized and far from been efficient.

It was worse in the past. Now many code just usehtml.escape().

It is sad, but there is a copy of escaping function in almost every module which outputs XML or HTML. On one hand, it is a trivial function, and we want to avoid unneeded dependencies. On other hand, efficient and complete implementation is not so trivial. Butxml.sax.saxutils version is too generalized and far from been efficient.

It was worse in the past. Now many code just usehtml.escape().